Squiggles From the Id or Straight From the Brain

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Drawing Surrealism An untitled 1930s collage by Joseph Cornell is part of this exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.CreditCreditJoseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, Collection of Lauren and Daniel Long, New York, James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles, 2012 Museum Associates/LACMA, by Michael Bodycomb

Surrealism was very, very good to drawing. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any case, shortly after a young poet named André Breton issued his first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 the movement and the medium — aided and abetted by a large cohort of talented artists and writers — joined forces, to extraordinary mutual benefit. That art continues to reap the fruits of this union is one of the many lessons of “Drawing Surrealism,” a sensational exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Drawing was an ideal art form for the Surrealists, with their initial opposition to painting as bourgeois, cumbersome and requiring too much skill. (Nearly anyone, after all, could make a decent drawing, or a few; several by the writer Georges Bataille, possibly scratched out during therapy sessions around 1925, are among the show’s high points.) And being the art medium connected most directly to the brain, it also fit with and furthered the Surrealists’ wide-ranging interests in the id, dreams and language; chance, speed and fun; and disturbing juxtapositions.

The Surrealists, like this show, defined drawing very broadly. They invented or breathed new life into drawing techniques like frottage (pencil rubbings) and the game of exquisite corpse. They commandeered collage and took it places the Cubists never dreamed of. They also tended to crossbreed such techniques (as well as photography) in all sorts of enriching ways.

But despite drawing’s centrality to Surrealism’s many explorations, there have been very few exhibitions devoted exclusively to Surrealist drawings. The Morgan’s survey is the largest yet, and also the most international. Organized by Leslie Jones, curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it had its debut last fall, and Isabelle Dervaux at the Morgan, the show is somewhat smaller than the Los Angeles version, with several substitutions because of the fragility of paper. Even so, it contains 165 works by 70 artists from 15 countries, and is accompanied by a handsome catalog with an especially informative essay by Ms. Jones.

If some of the inclusions on view serve historical clarity more than visual scintillation, the show as whole nevertheless provides plenty to occupy the eye. The stage is set with four works by important precursors of Surrealism, all from before 1920: a dreamlike drawing by Giorgio de Chirico, a poem-drawing by Apollinaire and two collages that Jean Arp arranged using chance. After these the largely chronological show is arranged according to techniques, which changed and expanded over time as more artists joined the cause and as Breton’s edicts endorsed, dismissed and reratified various methods.

This approach makes “Drawing Surrealism” a great introduction to the movement and a valuable break with the fashion for thematic displays. It serves as a reminder that few things are more important to an artwork’s ultimate effect than the way it is made, while also giving the show a variety and briskness unusual to exhibitions of drawings.

Breton’s first manifesto was directed at writers, but its call for “pure psychic automatism” whether “by writing, or any other means,” which would take expression beyond reason and “all aesthetic or moral preoccupation,” was general. Drawing, clearly, was another means, and within months André Masson, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró were experimenting with automatic drawing. Still, the several works by them here suggest that absolute automatism was rarely achieved, if it was even desired.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), the most convincing example here is by that epitome of fussy drawing, Salvador Dalí. An untitled ink drawing from 1927, three years before he descended on Paris, is a superb tangle of lines and splatters that looks like nothing so much as an early Pollock. Also good is the fusion of sense and nonsense achieved in two drawings of Henri Michaux, with their lettucy rows of illegible cursive and symbols.

The show makes clear the importance of Max Ernst’s ingenuity to Surrealism. For example, he set in motion frottage, another way of introducing chance and avoiding conventional skill. Drawings were made by placing a paper on a textured surface — leaves, a wood floor — and rubbing it with graphite. Even before meeting Breton, in 1921, Ernst began using images from 19th-century store catalogs, medical textbooks and popular science magazines to fashion collages of Victorian interiors fraught with all kinds of disorienting warpings of space and behavior.

Both these developments reverberate and mutate throughout the exhibition. (The show includes works by two early adapters of Ernst’s old-fashioned images, Joseph Cornell and the Peruvian artist César Moro.)

The other echoing influence is the refined technique of Dalí, who single-handedly reversed the Surrealist aversion to meticulous realism and the old masters. His “Study for ‘The Image Disappears’ ” of 1938, in which the form of a beautiful woman doubles as the features of a bearded man, is echt Dalí. But the real gem is “Les 50 Secrets,” whose malformed creatures are seamlessly added to a page from a children’s reading manual.

The game of exquisite corpse offered new ways to embrace chance, downplay skill and avoid a unified style. This show has a clutch of the aberrant figures produced by the game, in which two or more players take turns drawing on paper folded so that most of what came before is invisible. Especially striking is a pink elephant head with a highly sexualized torso, boxy feet and a wandering tail, contrived in 1926 by Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise and Tanguy. Soon collage was added, with more hard-edge, mechanistic results.

A large 1930 charcoal by Miró merges aspects of the exquisite corpse and automatic drawing. Fringed with polyps, this gangly biomorphic creature concludes with a large toenail. It was inspired by the contention of Bataille (an early dissident, who disagreed with Breton’s idealization of the unconscious) that the big toe was the basest part of the body, farthest from the brain, closest to the dirt and often, as here, more than vaguely phallic.

A fertile bedlam prevails in the second half of the show, as techniques continue to be discovered and grafted, and other countries are heard from. The British artist Eileen Agar adds an automatist figure to a large photograph of a nude woman in a 1939 work that presages Sigmar Polke. The Japanese photographer Kansuke Yamamoto riffs on Dalí with photographs from around 1938 that combine drawing, collage and rephotography. Jindrich Heisler, a Czech artist, does something similar in 1943, but with softer, charcoal-like results.

In 1935 the Spaniard Oscar Dominguez started using decalcomania, which involves spreading ink over a sheet of paper that is then pressed with another sheet. When they are separated, strange, often geological textures result, inviting further fiddling. Proof positive of its rich potential comes in a beautiful, pink-spotted work from 1936 by Georges Hugnet, who also effectively merged frottage and collage.

In the mid-1930s both the Chilean Roberto Matta and a little-known British artist-psychiatrist Grace Pailthorpe created hairy landscapes that are a little too solidly fleshy in ink. Nearby Frida Kahlo dashes off a dense constellation of her motifs in pencil.

Soon we start seeing the early glimmerings of both Abstract Expressionism and its discontents: strong works by Pollock and Arshile Gorky; dissenting figuration by John Graham and Alfonso Ossorio (the latter presaging Mad magazine’s vehemence); and febrile strangeness from the delicate Wols, alone here in his debts to Klee and Bosch.

Among the surprises is a maplike drawing by Leonora Carrington that evokes Ree Morton and a fluffy yet glowering orb of black lines by Lee Mullican. It brings us full circle, back to Dalí’s automatist outburst.

“Drawing Surrealism” is on view through April 21 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: Squiggles From the Id Or Straight From the Brain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe